Research Associate Elyan Jeanine Hill on ‘Women's Ritual, Dance, and Identity’
Elyan Jeanine Hill's 2022-23 project at the WSRP is "Spirited Choreographies: Women’s Ritual, Identity, and History-Making in Ewe Performance." / Courtesy photo
As an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts, Dr. Elyan Hill’s research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia, and their diasporas.
Hill, who is Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African Religions at Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program in 2022-23, specializes in African and African Diaspora art history. She has received fellowships and grants from UCLA’s International Institute, the Fowler Museum, the West African Research Association (WARA), the Africana Research Center at Penn State, The Arts Council for the African Studies Association (ACASA), and The Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her work has been published in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas, published by Duke University Press. She also maintains a curatorial practice that embraces experimental ethnography and Black feminist ethics.
Below, Hill discusses her year-long research project at the WSRP, which is focused on the conceiving of spirit possession rituals as forms of critical social practice. Engaging with women’s associations that orchestrate festival and ritual events, Hill’s project looks at female ritual specialists’ proposed solutions to perceptions of economic decline by transmitting moral and cultural knowledge to young women and generating narratives of enslavement, migration, and trade.
Since long before my formal introduction to women’s studies scholarship, my intellectual pursuits and interests have revolved around women’s issues. From a young age, I was aware of the contradictions between the pivotal labor that women contribute to society and the casual dismissal of such labor in certain social circles. Additionally, learning that my parents’ country, Liberia, was the site of institutionalized sexual violence against women during the nation’s civil war, and, conversely, of strong traditions of women’s leadership, culminating in Liberia’s election of the first female head of state in Africa, inspired me to explore the tensions of global feminisms in my research and teaching.
I took a class on African American history at Mount Holyoke during my undergraduate studies, which opened my eyes. I began to realize how much I didn't know and how many narratives had been flattened completely to focus on one main male figure rather than expanding to all the other communities—all the women, all the young people, all the different types of people who are involved in a movement. I began to think about my own West African history and to wonder, how much less do I know about my African histories, especially women’s narratives?
This question inspired me to think about what evades the history books. What doesn't make it into the books that we read, and instead are maintained only in an unwritten form? I did more research on African histories and started to realize that there are many African histories that take the form of sacred arts, a form of religious practice that is transferred from one generation to the next—from one community to the next—through trade and different exchanges. I found that rather than being spoken, many of these stories have been performed through dance in devotional practices for spirits.
I became interested in both the multimodal elements that were going into the production of a history and about the people who are performing these histories today. Why have people chosen to continue to perform certain histories rather than writing them down? What is the difference between a written history, an oral history, and a dance history, and how do these forms of communicating operate in different ways?
Written history is about a specific framing of an event in time and place, but an oral history is often about the interpretation of an event. Whether narrated as a parable or a fable, an oral history can connect to other types of storytelling to interpret the event rather than simply faithfully recount the event. The importance in oral transmission is to bring the history into our lives today. So how can it be understood today? How can it continue to be remembered?
In dance history, the story is told through the relationships between the players. The story is not only about what happened, but also about who was involved and how they were related to each other in space. I think of dance histories as a type of mapping where you set out the space and you're able to inhabit a history in ways that think about those spatial relationships.
I held a museum educator position at the Fowler Museum at UCLA during my first year of grad school that helped me in the process of coming to this research. I saw many works of art that were created to be used in people’s daily lives—whether as sacred arts for the altars or, as is often in the African contexts, sacred objects that were made to be worn by people who are performing.
Seeing these objects helped me to see both how dance can be a presentational strategy for art-making and how objects affiliated with the body, or to be placed on an altar, are an important aspect in how one interprets that object. Different objects relate to different people's biographies; these objects will get passed on, and the narrative can get retold in different ways depending on who's wearing it and depending on how it's performed.
This understanding helped me to see there was a place in talking about our histories that could allow me to talk about the body in ways that people and the arts are moving from one space to another—from one country to another.
I bring this understanding into the class that I am teaching at HDS, “Dancing Diasporas: Black Feminist Art in Practice,” which is a bringing together of dance studies with African and African diaspora art history in a way that helps us to understand diaspora as being something that moves across cultures, across oceans, across a lot of different disciplinary boundaries.
We began the class by talking about diaspora and how diaspora isn't just one thing. To give the students a wide proliferative framework to start, we added more elements as we discuss what diaspora is in conjunction with discussions of feminist theories, religious materiality, dance and performance studies.
In the course, we talk about people originally from India who live in Guyana or Jamaica, and people who come from the Caribbean and go to Africa—people who have been there for generations and how they are also part of African diasporas. We are engaging with scholarship from multiple disciplines, festivals, films, and novels in order to ask how religious practices enrich the lives and inform the identities of Afro-Atlantic women in nations including Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Congo, France, Germany, and the United States.
In addition to teaching during my time here at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program, I am working on a book about the power of performance and material culture within the context of African art.
I have been working with the African Ewe women in Togo (West Africa). The women were teaching their girls the histories, dances, music, and songs, and how to dress in a traditional way, and I was able to learn the dance along with the girls. Their dance style deeply connects their history of migration from a city in Togo into the Volta region of Ghana through a dance that is performed by moving backwards. I found that a lot of the girls had learned these dance movements since they were very young, as a kind of initiation and a process of educating the young about their communities. The dances were a part of their identity.
I research Black Atlantic religious practices, including Vodun, an Indigenous religious practice that honors ancestral spirits and teaches communities to live in cooperation with nature. Vodun practices endeavor to heal the present the past through understanding how past relationships continue to deeply influence the present.
We can think about Vodun as involving very complex histories of multiple narratives that come together and are integrated into people's lives. Traditions are never static.
When we think about ourselves, our ancestors, and the people who are coming after us as all deeply interconnected, we realize that our actions have reverberations into the present and that the ghost stories of history are present in our bodies in ways that writing does not always completely capture. This brings the importance of histories to light as we shape more expansive and multivocal narratives.
—Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto, HDS correspondent